Murphy, a Barcelona-based startup building AI agents for debt collection, has raised $15m in a funding round led by Northzone. The funding was split between $13m in seed funding and $2m in pre-seed funding, and other investors in the round included ElevenLabs, Lakestar, Seedcamp and Enzo Ventures.
It’s the latest allocation of capital towards a company building AI agents — tools that act autonomously to complete a wide range of tasks without human intervention. So far this year AI agent startups have raised €1.9bn, according to Sifted data.
Spain-based Murphy sees AI agents as the solution to increasing efficiency in debt collection, which CEO Borja Sole tells Sifted is a slow, fragmented and highly analogue industry. Banks maintain costly call centres to collect debt, but also pass on the process to external debt collection agencies. As the debt collection goes further down the chain, this can create information bottlenecks, making it harder to recover the debt.
“There’s a huge potential for automating part of that flow,” says Sole.
Murphy has used OpenAI’s tech to build multilingual AI agents that can communicate with debtors via SMS, email, WhatsApp and over the phone.
“What we’re doing is making it sound as human as possible,” Sole says.
The company’s clients include telcos, utility companies, banks and debt collection agencies (DCAs). It charges a percentage fee based on successful debt collection outcomes.
Replacing human agents
Debt collection is one of the trickier corners of the financial services industry and typically involves dealing with vulnerable customers. Sole says Murphy’s AI agents have guardrails in place built on the same policies banks and debt collection agencies have for dealing with vulnerable customers.
“Compliance and cybersecurity is our number one concern,” Sole says.
Replacing human agents with AI could also displace thousands of people working in debt collection industry across Europe. According to industry research firm IBISWorld, collection agencies and credit bureaus employ 114k people across the continent. Sole tells Sifted this is a good thing, as debt collectors are in an industry that’s “not really fulfilling”.
“We’re making lives better in that sense,” Sole says. “Because at the end of the day, nobody wants to be dealing with collecting money and having to push people that cannot pay.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-agents-debt-murphy/
